The Air Force Combat veteran and former nurse added that financially strained hospitals are easily influenced to declare a patient brain dead because they’re keen to free up bed space.

The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday, cites a 19-year-old car crash victim who was still struggling to breathe and showing signs of brain activity when doctors gave the green light for his organs to be harvested.

The lawsuit cites three other examples of patients who were still clinging to life when doctors gave a ‘note’ – an official declaration by a hospital that a patient is brain dead, which, as well as consent from next of kin, is required before a transplant can take place.

The suit claims that a man was admitted to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, a month later, again showing brain activity.

It claims McMahon protested but was blown off by hospital and donor network staff, and the man was declared brain dead and his organs harvested.

In November 2011, a woman admitted to Staten Island University Hospital after a drug overdose was declared brain dead and her organs were about to be harvested when McMahon noticed that she was being given ‘a paralyzing anesthetic’ because her body was still jerking.

‘She was having brain function when they were cutting into her on the table,’ McMahon told MailOnline. ‘He had given her a paralyser and there’s no reason to give someone who is dead a paralyser.’

He said he confronted the person who gave it to her and he was speechless.

Lawsuit: The suit claims a 19-year-old car crash victim was still alive when doctors at Nassau University Medical Center, pictured, declared him brain dead

‘Finally he said he was told to do it because while they were cutting her chest open she was moving her chest around. And a paralyser only paralyses you, it does nothing for the pain,’ he said.

‘They took her eyes, her joints. She was right there when I was having the conversation. They were inserting the plastic bones where the real ones had been.’

According to the lawsuit, when McMahon probed further on the disturbing case another network employee told hospital staff he was ‘an untrained troublemaker with a history of raising frivolous issues and questions.’

‘I had a reputation for raising a red flag,’ he said.

McMahon has accused the donor network of having a ‘quota’ system and hiring ‘coaches’ to teach staff how to be more persuasive in convincing family members to give consent to organ donation.

He said ‘counselling’ staff are like sales teams who are pressured to meet targets and threatened with the loss of their jobs if they fall short.

‘If you don’t meet the quotas then you’ll get fired – that’s a fact. I saw it happen,’ he said.

‘You’re not there for grief counselling, you’re there to get organs. It’s all about sales — and that’s pretty much a direct quote from the organisation. Counsellors are required to get a 30 per cent consent rate from families.’

Lawsuit: The New York Organ Donor Network has been accused of bullying hospitals into declaring patients brain dead when they’re still alive so organs can be harvested (stock photo)

McMahon added that staff members who collect the most organs throughout the year qualify for a Christmas bonus.

‘If counselors do well by getting a lot of organs they are given a bonus in December,’ he said.

The veteran – who worked at the donor network between July and November last year – said there are about 30-40 staff who are out in the field, going to hospitals and trying to get signatures and donations.

He said other workers concentrate on managing the candidates or the patients who are brain dead.

McMahon claims that on November 4, he told the network’s CEO and president, Helen Irving, that ‘one in five patients declared brain dead show signs of brain activity at the time the Note is issued.’

But the suit says, she replied: ‘This is how things are done.’

He told MailOnline the next day he was sacked.

‘My job was to make sure people were doing things right and when I spoke up I got punished,’ he said. ‘It was disgusting to me. There was such complacency and a lack of concern. They say ‘these organs save people’ but what if that person was alive. I witnessed the fact they were alive.’

The network could not be reached by MailOnline for comment but spokesman Julia Rivera told The New York Post that McMahon’s claims of a quota system were ‘ridiculous. There are no quotas.